Technological advances associated with computers, the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled users to instantly access a vast and diverse amount of information. As compared to traditional libraries or encyclopedias, information provided by way of the Web is decentralized in nature. To locate information of interest, a user can employ a search engine that facilitates finding content stored on local or remote computers. Search engines can assist in locating information on the public Web, intranets, personal computers, and the like. Typical search engines can retrieve a list of references (e.g., search results) matching inputted criteria provided by the user. For instance, the user can perform a query by providing a word or phrase to the search engine and in response the search engine can return a list of search results matching the entered word, phrase, or a portion thereof. To further specify search queries, many search engines support utilization of Boolean terms such as, for instance, AND, OR and NOT as well as provisions related to a distance between keywords.
The convergence of direct pen input devices, full text indexing of personal stores, and Internet search engines offers tremendous unexplored opportunities to design fluid user considered to be, for example, the combination of pen-and-ink note taking with searching, linking, collecting, and sense making activities. This is in contrast to simple note taking, which is characterized by moment-to-moment transcription. Active note taking for example is typically performed by knowledge workers engaged in challenging creative work such as scientific research, product design, or planning complex activities, and the like. The knowledge workers often create informal pre-production work artifacts on paper, in notebooks, or on whiteboards, sketching preliminary plans and manipulating their notes to find solutions to difficult problems.
In light of the above, personal information search and web-based search are trends with huge significance. More than ever, there are more and more documents, files, data, notes, etc. on computers and/or mobile devices such as a tablet, pocket PC, or smartphone. In addition, the amount of information available on the Internet continues to grow and is a compounding factor for the amount stored and accumulated data. Conventional techniques for querying and/or accessing such data are inefficient as attention is diverted to perform the search rather than on the task that instigated the search.